Garbage I wrote for the Guardian
Part two in this series is 'The day I wore high heels' - for the first (and last) time ever!
"You can cut off all the women of the world at the ankles," a famous male foot fetishist once wrote. "Give me the part from the ankles down and you can have the rest." Thank goodness I discovered feminism before fashion. Having just spent 18 long hours in high heels, which I have never worn before, I am intensely grateful for my trainers. I am wearing them now and looking at them with the love usually reserved for my mother.
It all begins at 7.30am. I struggle into these alien monstrosities, helped by my Jimmy Choo aficionado lodger, Anni, who tells me I'll have to wear tights. Tights? Those things that make your legs feel like an insomniac in nylon sheets? Anni helps me stand up in the shoes, and tries to teach me how to walk. "Put your heel down first, and swing your hips when you put one foot in front of the other." It just gets worse. I've never been tempted to wear high heels, even as a teenager. This may sound odd, but I don't even dress up for parties.
High heels are supposed to make you look more elegant, improve your posture, provide that frisson of sexual excitement. Sorry to disappoint, but I feel as sexy as a dead rat. And by the time the photographer arrives, at 10.30am, I'm in serious pain.
To City College to talk to journalism students. I am met by a lovely young woman who tells me she really likes my writing on issues such as rape, murder and prostitution. How stupid do I feel, therefore, to have to explain why I am walking in a peculiar manner, holding on to railings, and begging her to lead me to the lift? By this stage, I have been wearing the shoes for five hours. I had been told by veteran heel-wearers my feet would soon go numb. I am waiting for this to happen. Searing pain, which had begun in my toes, has travelled to my calves and, inexplicably, ended up in my right thigh. I leave the university, barely standing. I am forced to walk by taking tiny steps, and realise there is no way I could run away from danger, or even for a bus, in these abominations.
Sheila Jeffreys wrote, in her fascinating book Beauty And Misogyny (2006), that, "The wearing of high heels causes pain, disability and, often, permanent deformity." Such remarks often cause hysterical rebuttals, and accusations of humourless feminism. I am learning, however, in one day, how right she is.
In the evening I am booked to record a TV debate about prostitution. I am well known among the pro-prostitution lobby as an outspoken critic of the sex trade. As I come face-to-face with my opponents, they appear shocked at my appearance. I am never pleased to see them but, being a professional, am not usually wearing a look of pure agony. I look around and all of the women are voluntarily wearing heels. I resist the temptation to rant about how ridiculous it is to wear instruments of torture, day in, day out.
Manolo Blahnik
Sex And The City's Sarah Jessica Parker, who is mugged in one episode for her Manolos, says, "You have to learn how to wear his shoes; it doesn't happen overnight. I've destroyed my feet, but I don't care. What do you need your feet for anyway?" I need my feet, and I want to, as far as possible, live without daily, avoidable pain. Is that too much to ask?
First published March 7th 2008
This is great, tell all your friends to subscribe! Why I put myself on a blog budget and waited to get here, I can't explain. I laughed out loud, because I'm a trans widow and was an involuntary audience member for performances of "womaning" by my former husband, who thinks he's a special kind of female, as he went through his "hot chick" phase in the mid 1990s. During his experimentation with CFM shoes, the acronym meaning, "come fuck me," I'd drop off our 5 and 8 year old sons at the court-appointed location, as some dude chatted him up on a bench outside of Connecticut Muffins in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
I learned about CFM shoes from a cosmopolitan friend who grew up in Manhattan. We don't talk now, as my TERF identity is radioactive with her crowd. (she has a great story about Woody Allen trying to pick her up when she was 16 though) I never wore high heels, having taken heed from my very traditional father that men will look at me the wrong way. I believe he succeeded with all of us, and we were a family of five daughters. One of the granddaughters is a high powered attorney for a multinational corporation and I think she carries a pair of Jimmy Choos or something in her designer handbag and wears them for effect an hour at a time.
I'm very thankful to my lesbian friends going back to the early 1990s, who said, "He's not your ex-wife. Don't let anyone tell you that." I never did. I went through a Hungarian-dance-boots phase in my 20s and graduated to those rocking shoes after dancing took its toll. The Hungarians did not prepare me for Neddy's mini-skirt and over-the-knee boots period, the one he went through right after the surgeries. I believe the purpose was to show the world he'd practiced how to cross his legs. It was so odd to see that six inches of thighs paraded out in the world, so our sons could watch passersby averting their eyes.
I have to go order some fresh rocking shoes now. Really looking forward to the next one~
Thanks to the much-maligned 2nd Wave Feminism which I encountered as a teenager while babysitting for young women in the US who had subscriptions to Ms. magazine, I began college in 1977 with a fervent, if immature commitment to feminism. Every paper I wrote in my first year had the word "women" in it. As a freshman in a history class about China, one paper I wrote was entitled "Women and Footbinding in Ancient China." I was just a kid and didn't really know how to properly do academic research, but I learned some shocking shit. I learned that it was the privileged and wealthy women, not the peasants, who had the tiny bones in their feet crushed for the sake of fashion, making it nearly impossible to walk. The smaller the better. the more bones crushed the better. This practice was not only "fashion," it served the sexual fetishes of men. The wrappings on the feet with the smell of decaying flesh were prized sexual artifacts. Ugh. This was before the internet of course. The books I got from the library in my college had large parts redacted because of the pornographic nature of the content. The connection to the barbarity of high heels in our own culture was obvious to me. There is a reason most humans who must get treatment from a podiatrist are female--and that reason is high heels. Not as bad as footbinding, but they are truly barbaric and crippling. I have rarely worn high heels in the subsequent decades of my life. I am healthier, stronger, and more stable because of it in my 60s. I am grateful for this early understanding of a serious feminist issue.